Why You Should Never Kill a Garden Spider: Garden Lover's Best Friend

Almost every gardener has had the experience of bending down to pick off a ripe red tomato when -- ploof! -- the thing slips away. It was replaced by a wobbly-legged spider, peering back at you from between two leaves.

If your first reaction was to recoil, grab a broom, or hurl a bottle of insecticide, you are not alone. Spiders have an undeserved reputation. Hollywood makes them out to be scary monsters, and we dress them up as ghosts for Halloween.

Here's a secret that every smart gardener eventually learns: spiders are the best pest control agents money can buy.

While caterpillars munch holes in your prize-winning cabbages and beetles shred your roses to ribbons, spiders stick to the rules: they won't bite your precious plants.

Instead, they spend all day and night catching the garden villains that would.

Read on for some practical reasons why spiders are friends your plants will thank you for having around.

They Have an Appetite for Garden Villains

Think of spiders as little round-the-clock security guards patrolling your garden.

In a garden, there are always insects looking to eat your plants. Spiders don't care if an insect is crawling, swimming, or flying. They'll snag it if it happens to be roughly the same size as the spider is.

Here are just a few of the pests that spiders can help get rid of for you.

• Aphids and small flies: These sappy little creatures girdle tender stems and suck the juices out of your plants. Tiny spiders catch them by the dozens.
• Moths and caterpillars: These beautiful night fliers are egg machines. A single moth can lay hundreds of eggs on your greens. After you get rid of the moth, you'll have fewer caterpillars to wrestle with.
• Beetles and grasshoppers: These hungry little vegans can eat an entire bed of leafy greens in one night. Bigger spiders will leap on these pesky vegetarian marauders mid-crawl.
• Slugs and cutworms: These garden vampires slither around your garden, leaving destruction in their wake. Ground spiders grab them before they can do much damage to your prized seedlings.

Researchers figure that spiders eat hundreds of millions of tons of insects every year. That means fewer bugs damaging your crops and more good, healthy food for your family.

They Cover All the Ground

Spiders aren't the only ones who patrol your garden for insects. Other spiders will stake out their territory where the pests are likely to show up.

• The Aerial Web Weavers: Most people recognize these spiders by the large, round webs that they stretch between posts and across trellises. They lie in wait for insects to wander onto their webs and trap them with their super glue-like silk. In the morning or evening, the spider will come and tidy up its dinner and repair the web for the next day's hunt.
• The Ground Crawler Wolf Spiders: If you ever unearth a burrowing spider while you're cleaning up your flowerbeds, you might have seen a wolf spider. These creatures don't make webs, but they hunt insects in much the same way that wolves hunt deer. The wolf spider stalks its prey, and then pounces on it like a pouncing housecat. Wolf spiders are useful because they can get into small spaces. Spider webs can't reach into cracks and crevices, but the wolf spider can.
• The Jumping Spider Detectives: Jumping spiders are clever little creatures with huge, shiny eyes that rotate to spot you peering around the corner. These hunters stalk insects on broad-leafed plants and creep up on them like cats. They use their incredibly strong legs to jump on a wriggling fly or flea beetle and pin it to the ground, undamaged, leaf petal intact.
• The Flower Flagger Crab Spiders: These clever little spiders are natural at blending in with their backgrounds. They often hide among the petals of your flowers, changing colors to look like the flowers themselves. This is an excellent camouflage because it means they can pounce on any pests that come by to nibble on your flower buds. Crab spiders can hold the enemy until you're ready to dispose of them, safely guarding your plants from marauding bugs.

They Stop Plant Diseases in Their Tracks

Did you know that plants get diseases just like people do?

Many of the nastiest garden problems, like leaf curl and yellow speckling, are often spread by insects.

Insects act as disease vectors, much like HIV-positive needles in blood banks.

1. A sick bug feeds on an infected plant or weed somewhere.
2. Then, it flies or crawls to your prized tomato or pepper bush.
3. The insect injects the disease into the tomato's sap, and now your healthy plant is infected, and there's no cure.

If a healthy spider population is in place to catch these bugs when they come near your plants, the garden stays healthy. Healthy spiders are like the infection police for your garden.

They Are More Effective (and Safe) than Chemical Sprays

When gardeners see insects invading their gardens, they often reach for an insecticide can. But pesticides are not the answer. In the long run, chemical sprays make the pest problem far worse.

Here's how sprays end up hurting you more than the mosquitoes.

Spray poisons the good guys. Sprays harm spiders, ladybugs, and bees that do useful jobs.

Bad insects bounce back first. Aphids can reproduce so fast that even if you spray them all dead, they'll crawl back in a day.

The spray makes more pests. Spiders take months to grow up and reproduce. If you spray away the existing spiders, the few stragglers will multiply until they're crowding your prize tomatoes.

Spiders do a much better job than a bottle of insecticide ever could. When there are plenty of insects around, the spiders grow fat, healthy, and reproduce. When the bugs are gone, the spiders have no reason to compete for food, so they disperse and look for something else to eat for a while. You get balanced natural pest control throughout the year without having to poison your food garden.

Ways to Invite Spiders Into Your Yard

Letting spiders into your garden is easy. In fact, you may already be doing some of these things without realizing it.

• Leave some mulch under your plants: During hot summer days, spiders love to crawl around under a 2-inch mulch of straw, leaves, or wood chips.
• Plant a variety of plants of different heights: Web-building spiders like to hang their webs from branches. By combining sunflowers, tomatoes, asters, and thyme, all the way down to creeping phlox, you'll give the spiders plenty of places to hang out.
• Put off cleaning up your garden until spring: Over the winter, spider egg sacs hatch out in hidden places in your plants. By waiting until April to clean out your garden beds, you'll give the new baby spiders a chance to set up shop and protect your new seedlings.
• Put your sprays and soaps away: Even "natural" sprays can harm and kill spiders. If you notice one plant has an aphid infestation, try spraying it with a strong jet of water from your garden hose. This will reduce the number of aphids without harming your friendly neighborhood spiders.

A New Perspective on Your Backyard

Next time you find yourself with a squash leaf in one hand and an eight-legged creature in the other, remember that the spider is there to help. It's there to keep the garden pests away so that your vegetables can grow nice and big. Give it a respectful nod and let it be on its way.